Chris’s cooking style, as you may or may not know, is somewhat instinctive. If he does follow a recipe, he approximates and often ignores the given directions. If you are a person who loves exact numbers in cooking, you may not like this recipe’s lack of precision. Chris would like to let you know that it works best if you see it with the eyes of your heart.
Chris has lately been in the habit of burning my tongue to ashes. I am fairly sure he does not have taste buds anymore, and based on his spice tolerance I am beginning to think he no longer has a stomach. He probably just has a stainless-steel-lined black hole for an abdominal cavity. So after seeing my eyes water through two dinners in a row, Chris decided to seriously tone it down and for this recipe, he only tripled the amount of spices recommended.
It actually turned out to be very savory and not at all spicy, even by Gloria standards, because he used taco sauce for the vinegar-based sauce requirement. In his typical style, he did not measure the ingredients, so the below are approximations and should be adjusted to taste.
Ingredients:
- raw unshelled shrimp ~1 pound
- 1tsp paprika
- .5tsp thyme
- .5tsp oregano
- 1tsp ground cayenne pepper (sub chile powder for less spice, or use less)
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
- “a blob” (maybe about a tablespoon and a bit) of vinegar based sauce (hot sauce, taco sauce, worcester sauce or some combination therein)
- a splash of citrus
For the sauce:
- 3/4 to 1 onion
- “some” celery
- “some” scallions
- 1 tomato, more or less
- 1c broth of your choice
- white wine (optional)
- spice mixture above used for shrimp
Mix the spices and the shrimp and let marinate for at least 15 minutes. In a skillet, melt a “good chunk” of butter, then bring the heat to high. Cook the shrimp until pink, 2-3 minutes. Remove the shrimp, leaving the seasoned butter in the pan.
Add the chopped onions, celery, tomatoes, and scallions to the pan, cook 2-3 minutes or until onions begin to become translucent. Add the broth and a splash of the white wine and allow to reduce until slightly thickened. Turn down heat and return shrimp to pan; toss to coat. Serve with a bread of choice.
Chris made a box of Jiffy cornbread, substituting buttermilk for regular milk. I highly recommend this any time you make cornbread for anything. It is softer, fluffier, and the taste is fuller. Sorry about the photo quality; the room was dim and I was too hungry to attempt more photos—thus the bite in the cornbread.
Cooking by smell is one of the more useful skills! Also potentially disastrous if you catch a cold…
I generally make cornbread muffins every weekend, I’ll try out the buttermilk substitution! Fluffy is good and hopefully it’ll be less crumbly than normal.